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are you wondering what needs to be included in project management status reports well in this video i'm going to share with you what exactly you should have in your project status report and if you're in need of help to build your project management skills i have an amazing free training for you and i'm going to put the link for you under this video hi if you're new here welcome my name is adriana girdler and on this channel you're going to get the best career and project management advice please consider subscribing as it really helps us grow this awesome community now if you're ready to learn more about project status updates then let's get to it what is a project status report well it basically summarizes what your project progress is in comparison to project plan now there's many ways you can do this you can put your project status report in a word document you can put it in a powerpoint you can create a page on a web-based platform if you actually use something like that for your project so there are different ways that you can put your status report now who would you send this to well you would send it to all the stakeholders of the project and again don't forget who stakeholders are they're anyone who touches the project so it could be people like your team members who are very in-depth and understand what's going on it could be steering committee members sponsors it could also be senior executives who are on the peripheral edge of communication when it comes to your project it could also be the end user or department who is receiving the deliverable again anyone who touches a project really should have an understanding of your status update report you want to use it as a communication tool it really is to keep everyone in the loop now what's the frequency that you do with this status update report i personally like once a month i think that's really helpful you have enough things that have gone by and occurred so that when you have your status update report it actually has some good information and it will be different than your last status update report so that frequency is really important now how would you distribute this it really is dependent upon the type of document platform that you use so if you're doing more of a word document or powerpoint you may want to email that out to people and make that just a monthly recurrence you may have a project share drive that maybe you want to put it on there and people go to it or like i said you may want to use a web-based platform i use microsoft office sharepoint and i actually create all my project documents on there and i bring people to it so there's definitely different ways depending on really what how how do you use and communicate with your projects now what i'm going to show you next is what actually goes into that status update report project summary this is the first thing that you need to do so let me show you example follow me so with here we have the title of our update and it's a monthly update and here's a date of it being updated which was the second and your first section always and any update is a project summary now there's a really good reason for this it's because you want to include information to remind people all those stakeholders what it is that we're doing and what is it that you would include in this project summary well the scope statement which is what is it that i'm responsible for from a delivery standpoint and for this particular project we're implementing a new future state security center and it's very specific with focus on streamlining people activities and implementing some technology to support new ways of working now we also include the project priority matrix because this is going to let people know what your constraints are what you're willing to optimize and accept from a scope time and budget perspective this becomes really handy when you have people off to the side asking you to oh just add this element without having an understanding of everything else so you can bring them back to this and saying hey i can't do it my biggest constraint is time and what you're asking me to do is to increase time unless you have money which is budget in order to help me out i'm not able to do it so it becomes a real powerful tool for you and in fact in my slave project management course with the link under this video i actually go into this in great detail i love this project priority matrix and now the next thing that you would have in your project summaries are high level milestones not your detail just very high level you want to give an overarching view to anybody who's looking at this what is it that we're doing and when are we delivering it by it's really very high level it supports a scope statement of the priority matrix so that anyone coming into it especially a brand new person can get very quickly what is your project all about so when they read the rest of the information in your status update it makes sense overall project status so this is very simply put what is the overall status of your project are you on track or at risk let's go back to that example so i can show you more okay now we want to go to the overall oops project status which is basically saying overall my project as a whole how is it is it on track do i have some issues i like to use a strop light system of green yellow and red and green just means you're on track yellow i may have some potential risks but we're working on it in red is i definitely have some issues i'm probably going to need some intervention in order to ensure that i get out of that not a bad thing to have any reds or yellows in fact i always tell everyone you need to have reds and yellows if i come across a project that's always in green status i question it and saying i don't know if they actually know what's going on because i've never come across a project that is constantly 100 percent in green status on track unless it's just myself and i've complete 100 control so if someone were to just look at the project summary and they just wanted to say hey how's this project right away immediately they know this project overall is on track project deliverables or major milestone status this is the heartbeat of your status report so this is where all the detail is going to be now that we have the project summary which is really important we have our overall status which i'm saying is green now we're going to get to the heart of this project status update and that is project deliverable status so again using the same stoplight system of green yellow and red i'm now going to be very specific to what deliverables i'm going to be giving a status on now what i usually do is in my charter i know what my major deliverables are and i'm just going to use those same deliverables in my monthly status update so this is not an exhaustive list this is just an example i'm giving you in regards this was an actual real project and due to confidentiality i can't necessarily put everything in there but just to give you an idea of some things so from a deliverable standpoint of this project we had upgrade of computer hardware upgrade of furniture we had to look at hiring new resources and we had to do some training believe me there's a lot more but for this example i just want to make it short and sweet for you now it's really important because this is the heartbeat of everything this is really getting the nitty gritty is define what your deliverable is because i promise you people come in with assumptions and you want to negate those assumptions by just defining it and then you want to give your status for each one green yellow red green again do not be afraid of having reds and yellows it just means that you understand your project you're on top of everything and don't forget hear yellow potential risk but the team is monitoring them and if i have a red it means my team is working on fixing the issue that could be literally them going in and doing themselves me reaching out to maybe some steering committee members whatever it may be and your comment is for each deliverable so for example the upgrading of the computer hardware as of this update everything's on track items have been ordered great updating upgrading our furniture well we're having some issues because the original design configuration we can't seem to get what we originally thought we designed and we're ordering so we're trying to find alternatives with our supplier that to me is a yellow we're monitoring it we're coming up with an alternative solution it's not a red because it's not an issue it just means we have to find a different solution for it resources i mark down as a red because we're having a difficult time finding qualified resources we're going to revisit our requirements and definitely go to our steering committee to get approval for those changes and then i got some training execution which if i were to scroll here is really towards the end of my project and i'm not there yet i just said as of august 2nd deliverable hasn't started yet so i'm giving myself a little bit of a bonus by saying it's green it's on track because it is on track i'm doing everything else in order to make it work so this is your heartbeat again you want to have your project summary so that people understand it and even though my project deliverable has some reds and yellows i still feel as a project manager my project is green even though i have a few yellows and reds because i have plans in place in order to address them issues and risk this is where you're going to outline some high level external elements that are impacting your project that you want to share with your stakeholders anything that's going to impact scope time or budget let's go back to that example now we're going to go to the last section of your status update issues and risks so this is where you're going to highlight any issues that are not connected to a deliverable because there are things like that and you just want to give some information and any risks that you are identifying you want to place it here again you want to show your due diligence that you know what's going on with the project and anything that's going to impact your scope time and budget so with this section i actually have a risk and that's project timeline is being negatively impacted and now this is where you give that information what is it how are you going to address it and is there anything else of note so why is my timeline being negatively impacted is because as a project we're struggling with our it core team members to complete their tasks in the timeline associated we all have had that issue but this is not about finger pointing i'm now even going into greater detail why is this happening it's not because they don't care they do care it's a new project was launched and what happens when something new happens it's new it's shiny it's exciting and everyone is told to start working on it but now they're actually the department that launched this new project they're pulling my team members away from me why because i don't have a dedicated team 100 to this project in fact they have a whole bunch of other projects my subject matter expert so it's a balancing act but i'm now calling out saying that their managers are pulling on them to say hey start working on this project so it's now my job what i'm going to do as a pm is to speak to the direct managers and i'm going to bring up this issue for resolution to the steering committee because that's their job to remove my roadblocks so i just have to make sure that there's a balance of time for my team am i worried about this risk at the present moment not really that's why i said green but if i start talking to direct managers and steering committee and nothing happens then my project is going to go into the red very quickly but i'm going to at least show my due diligence and i'm going to show the paper trail that shows that i told everybody this again this update is powerful and i highly recommend that all your projects have one now that you know how to create a project status report it's now time for you to go to the link under this video and grab your seat for my free training on the fab 5 fundamentals of project management if you're here for status reports i'm letting you know go there because it's going to give you some really key elements are just going to help you be amazing at project management don't forget to subscribe to the channel like this video and please share with all the people you know it really helps us grow our community giving you more great content i really hope you like this video and please let me know if you have anything else that you would add to this any comments you have please put them in the comments below until the next video see you later